Nobody could board a stagecoach like Charles Dickens: he could make its headlong progress menacing, doom-laden or deliriously happy. Tom Pinch, the good, quiet man, is on his way to London, riding with the coachman at the gallop by day and then by night. "See the bright moon! High up before we know it: making the earth reflect the objects on its breast like water. Hedges, trees, low cottages, church steeples, blighted stumps and flourishing young slips, have all grown vain upon the sudden, and mean to contemplate their own fair images till morning. The poplars yonder rustle that their quivering leaves may see themselves upon the ground. Not so the oak, trembling does not become him, and he watches himself in his stout old burly steadfastness, without the motion of a twig," Dickens writes in Martin Chuzzlewit (1844), piling on the sense of pace and atmosphere.

"Clouds, too! And a mist upon the Hollow! Not a dull fog that hides it, but a light airy gauze-like mist, which in our eyes of modest admiration gives a new charm to the beauties it is spread before: as real gauze has done ere now, and would again so please you, though we were the Pope. Yoho! Why now we travel like the Moon herself. Hiding this minute in a grove of trees, next minute in a patch of vapour. Emerging now upon our broad clear course, withdrawing now, but always dashing on, our journey is a counterpart of hers. Yoho! A match against the Moon!"